LAUSD choice plan set for vote

Backers of a bold initiative allowing private operators to take over about a third of Los Angeles Unified campuses plan to draw hundreds of reform-minded parents to a rally today to pressure the school board to pass the measure.

After weeks of heated debate, the LAUSD school board is expected to vote today on a far-reaching "school choice" resolution that has drawn the support of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is expected to attend the 12:30p.m. rally at the district's downtown headquarters.

Ultimately, some 250 schools - about a third of the districts K-12 campuses - could be up for grabs.

That scenario worries union leaders, who say the plan could effectively lead to the privatization of public education in Los Angeles by letting parents and community members decide if they want their school to be a magnet, pilot, charter or traditional school.

But school board members behind the measure say the board would still have the final say on who operates these schools. They say urgent change is needed to lower appallingly high dropout rates and boost student performance.

"This is about no longer accepting mediocrity," said Yolie Flores-Aguilar, who authored the resolution entitled, "Public School Choice: A New Way at LAUSD."

"We cannot afford to wait ... We can not lose another generation of our students," she said.

If the plan is approved, private operators could submit plans on how to run the more than 50 new schools set to open at LAUSD over the next three years, in addition to more than 200 schools in the district that have failed to meet federal benchmarks on their state test scores.

Fiercely opposing the plan is organized labor and some community leaders, who see the reforms as divisive and polarizing.

Hundreds of protesters on both sides of the issue are expected to crowd today's board meeting in downtown. Streets surrounding LAUSD's Beaudry headquarters will be blocked off by around 10 a.m.

At a news conference Monday, Villaraigosa touted the proposal as the key to improving LAUSD's academic performance. The mayor also said he asked Flores-Aguilar and LAUSD board President Monica Garcia to look at a school choice plan last fall, something he outlined again in his State of the City address.

"(Today), LAUSD has an opportunity to forge a new path and truly transform the district," Villaraigosa said.

"There will no longer be a sense of entitlement, no more monopoly, no more held captive to only one choice."

Labor leaders have blasted the mayor's involvement.

"After voters decided that they did not want the mayor involved in our schools, this is his alternate route to get his takeover," said Andrea Canty, a spokeswoman for the California School Employees Association.

The mayor was also sharply criticized this month for attending "invitation-only" town hall meetings about the school choice plan sponsored by the Parent Revolution, a parent group funded by the Green Dot Charter organization, that excluded several parents.

A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, has vocally opposed the school choice plan, calling it the "privatization" of public education.

Duffy cited recent studies, including a Stanford study released this spring, that revealed that about 30 percent of all charters nationwide are performing worse than comparable non-charter schools.

"Is no one reading the data?" Duffy asked. "Charters are not doing any better. This is clearly an attempt to break up UTLA."

In its own analysis, the California Charter Schools Association compared recent state test scores of about a dozen charter sites, which also have expressed interest in vying for some of the available campuses under the new plan. Charter schools receive state funding, but they have greater independence over how to spend money and are not required to hire union workers.

The association said about 70 percent of the charter schools it compared out-performed all of their non-charter counterparts in English.

"Only a subset of charters are meaningfully interested in applying for these schools and that subset has some of the highest-performing charters in the city, far surpassing expectations," said Jed Wallace, president of the charter association.

LAUSD board member Margueritte LaMotte, who along with board member Steve Zimmer submitted several changes to the current plan, said much-needed changes were ignored. LaMotte said the plan should have made the district's lowest-performing schools - that have been designated program improvement schools for more than five years - the focus of this proposal. She also called the plan exclusionary because it names parent organizations, concentrated in the largely Latino district represented by Flores-Aguilar.

"We have people locked out of meetings ... we are naming certain groups ... This is not how we bring about reform," LaMotte said. "We have to find a way to give ownership of this district to all stakeholders before we give schools away and privatize education."